Solo: A Star Wars Story, in theaters May 25, 2018

[Negotiator]

1 hour ago, jenius said:

As a white man, I don't feel attacked by any of the new films. The Last Jedi had writing problems but I didn't feel there were race or gender issues at the heart of them, or even politics really. I do think that SW his much better off not being a vehicle for social commentary, it can be more inclusive without making a big point of it.

 

i agree, but shill news can find an excuse to blame you...ugh

[sh9000]

 

[jvmacross]

12 hours ago, sh9000 said:

 

Kylo Ren makes the best reviews.....

Forgot all about that music scene....that was awful, awkward, and disturbing all at once....thanks for the reminder Kylo!

Edited June 1, 2018 by jvmacross

[technoblue]

43 minutes ago, jvmacross said:

Kylo Ren makes the best reviews.....

Forgot all about that music scene....that was awful, awkward, and disturbing all at once....thanks for the reminder Kylo!

Yeah, I noticed the dissonance from that scene right off the bat. Not really a trend in western music which leans more toward consonance, and certainly not common for Star Wars. It tickled the part of my brain that knows how to read/play music and has studied music theory (long ago), but I guess if there was one thing that felt out of place that was it.

I don't know if they were trying to make the music seem more alien or what, but whatever they were aiming for it missed the tonal mark.

[Duymon]

I really feel like this movie was going to be the first of a trilogy, considering Alden was signed up for 3 movies based off his accidental leak in an interview. The Han we see in this film is Han in name only. He's a super optimisitc and naive kid like Luke. I really wish I could see what happened in part 2 and 3 to make Han what he is now....

Or maybe I just don't care about Han's origins background and wish he stayed a mysterious swashbuckler pirate bro who doesn't need to be explained.

Why does this current generation need to have everything explained to them? Is there no more room for freaking imagination?

Spoiler

Even his bloody last name has an explanation now... like BRO YOU WERE OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHAT SHIP UR DAD MADE BUT NOT HIS LAST NAME? !@(*$#!#@*$^#@*(&$#@(*&$^#@(*&$^E&@(*

 

 

[jenius]

I felt like we were missing the explanation there, like his dad sold him to the gang and that's why he abandons his given name.

[spacemanoeuvres]

14 hours ago, jenius said:

it can be more inclusive without making a big point of it.

Yes please. The recent SW films have a lot of problems; this is just one (a small one at that). 

The problem with prequels is you already know how things are going to end. Unless you have a very compelling story and/or the characters start out wildly different than they end up then *shrugs* who cares?

[electric indigo]

Idk, that's like saying we don't need any more movies with a historical context because we know how things ended already.

_

To the subject of the OT droids, I read a long time ago that Lucas' concept of 3PO and R2 goes back to Freud's superego and id, with 3PO being all about control and restriction (as seen in his arms), while R2 is completely impulse-driven and full of hidden surprises. Naturally, 3PO fails all the time while R2 provides all kinds of helpful solutions, but also gets in trouble regularly.

[danth]

On 5/29/2018 at 10:24 PM, Smacky said:

Right, saying people have something wrong with them because they have a particular opinion that doesn’t match yours...

...about whether women and minorities should be in movies.

On 5/30/2018 at 9:57 PM, Negotiator said:

but what's worse is diving into the race baiting of jon kasdan, (who only got the job because of his dad), that if you disagree with him, you are a white male/racist/mysoginist yada yada which would push that fanbase even further away.

If you disagree with him about whether women and minorities should be in movies.

You guys getting this yet?

[Negotiator]

1 hour ago, danth said:

...about whether women and minorities should be in movies.

If you disagree with him about whether women and minorities should be in movies.

You guys getting this yet?

as said before race/gender is not any kind of problem, but uh y'know keep dragging it in... smh.

19 hours ago, sh9000 said:

 

auralnauts is the best.  weirdly love creepio's "it's baby time" song.

still need to watch the last laser master.

[Dobber]

Finally got around to seeing the movie. I guess I’m in the minority as I really liked it. Enjoyed it FAR more than TLJ. Solo wasn’t a perfect movie by any means but I had a great time.

also that Kylo REN Review is priceless! Lol

Chris

[jenius]

I think most people enjoyed it, at least in this thread. Most the negativity is dredging up TLJ.

Edited June 1, 2018 by jenius

[Dobber]

Here’s to hoping they make more, I’d love to see more.

Chris

[Convectuoso]

Just saw the movie. It was just "OK" to me. It played it too safe. 

I guess Rogue One set the bar too high for this new batch of Star Wars movies. At least the cameos in RO made sense. The one in this movie was pointless 

[mikeszekely]

On 6/1/2018 at 6:07 PM, Dobber said:

Enjoyed it FAR more than TLJ.

That's not exactly a high hurdle to clear.  "Solo: better than two and a half hours of the good guys running slowly away from the bad guys and unnecessary side quests that make the situation worse yet could have been avoided if the people in charge would have just told everyone what the plan was instead of engaging in a pissing contest because Rian Johnson was more preoccupied with tearing down the setup from the last movie than establishing anything to take its place."

Anyway... I just came back from seeing Solo, and yes, I agree that it was better than The Last Jedi.  It wasn't a bad movie...

...but it wasn't really a good movie, either.  I've got plenty of complaints, and they can mostly be summed up as nothing of consequence really happened in the movie because all it did was over-explain a bunch of stuff we didn't need explained.

[mechaninac]

Disney's stewardship of Star Wars has brought the franchise to the point that the acrimony and backlash derived from the mediocrity the products, and ham-fisted shoehorning of politics and social issues is far more entertaining than the movies themselves...

[TangledThorns]

Bingo! Disney needs to listen to their fans.

 

[Scyla]

Moviebobs thoughts on the Solo box office performance and Internet fallout on Star Wars as a whole: 

 

[Chronocidal]

On ‎6‎/‎1‎/‎2018 at 8:46 AM, spacemanoeuvres said:

The problem with prequels is you already know how things are going to end. Unless you have a very compelling story and/or the characters start out wildly different than they end up then *shrugs* who cares?

For me, the new movies have actually put me at the exact same point though, from an entirely different direction.  Even without knowing the ending, TLJ made me actually dislike so many of the characters that I kind of don't care what happens to them.

But in both cases here, we already know the end point.  With Solo, you know exactly how the movie ends.  With Episode IX, you can also assume that the good guys win, in one way or another.  When you have a stationary end point, everything depends on the journey being entertaining, memorable, and enjoyable.

Now, I haven't seen Solo, but in TLJ's case?  I'm feeling like Poe's frustration about the ship running on fumes with no clear plan is getting dangerously close to tearing down what's left of the fourth wall.

[mikeszekely]

On 6/1/2018 at 11:46 AM, spacemanoeuvres said:

The problem with prequels is you already know how things are going to end. Unless you have a very compelling story and/or the characters start out wildly different than they end up then *shrugs* who cares?

I think, for me at least, this was the big difference between Rogue One and Solo.  Solo honed in on a few details mentioned in the original trilogy that didn't really need any further explanation, then over-explained them. It wasn't bad the way TLJ was, it was just kind of boring.

Rogue One started with a simple given, that the Rebels had stolen the plans for the Death Star, and managed to make an entertaining story explaining not just how that happened but why the Death Star had that vulnerability in the first place.

[M'Kyuun]

My wife and I saw it on Sunday, and we liked it. The last name bit was a  'whatever' moment, but overall it was an entertaining film. I thought the actors did a good job, esp Lando. 

Spoiler

Also, the Kessel Run was a cheat- like using nitro in a car, so technically the Falcon isn't that fast unless it's running on blue MacGuffin juice.  Bionic Maul was a nice surprise- right out of Rebels.

Anyway, I liked it better than TLJ, and it's a film for which I wouldn't mind a sequel, if only to tie up Q'ira's story and to maybe show the tenuous friendship between Han and Lando, as well as Han's and Chewie's further misadventures, and Han's growing cynicism as he becomes the man we see in A New Hope.

[kajnrig]

Saw it today, and I have a confession to make: I never noticed the dice in the original trilogy.

My thoughts going in were largely my thoughts coming out: It's good given what it is, but it continues Rogue One's trend of not making a particularly strong argument for why these side movies should exist.

It's a fan movie through and through. There are tons of Moments where the filmmakers really REALLY want to make sure the audience understands what answer they're giving to questions I never ever asked. The aforementioned dice, the Kessel run, meeting Chewie, the dice again, shooting first, the mother-loving dice, the last name. Every time the movie focuses on Han, it's to check off the list of Requisite Han's Past Plot Points. When it focuses on being its own movie, when Han is just another player in a gang of thieves, that's where the movie generates the most energy.

I thought I would hate L3-37 on the name alone, but she along with Lando were pretty frakking awesome and hilarious through and through... until their designated Sad Moment, when the movie plays the Sad Music to cue the audience to Be Sad. Donald Glover and Phoebe Waller-Bridge (had to look that up) act the crap out of their characters, but that moment falls flat because it's not earned; up until that point it's all laughs, all a fun heist caper, and then the movie does a sudden emotional U-turn and expects you to go along with it. The rest of the movie suffers from this at times, too, but I'm noting it here because after this Lando and L3's story is pretty much over. Probably a consequence of the troubled production, but all the same...

The sound mixing was downright bad at times. When Chewie and Han knock out the metal pole and the Stormtroopers fall into the pit, the *thud* made my seat literally vibrate. The music never knew when to shut up and let the scene simply be, and moreover varied in quality from knock it out of the park to shamelessly pandering (again, the fanservice).

There are the makings of a much better movie here. Ditch all the dumb, inconsequential Han's Past Plot Points, or at least don't make them the literal focus of specific shots. The dice were never anything more than background decoration in the OT because they didn't matter to the story. They were symbolically significant in The Last Jedi, receiving the tried and true Rule of Three treatment. But here, they don't represent much of anything besides... being a thing fans associate with Han.

Start the movie at the train heist. Establish that Chewie and Han are new to the team. Give the movie more time to play the characters off each other - Han and Beckett, Lando and L3, Beckett and... whoever his lover was whose death was treated dramatically for all of two seconds - and limit the story to JUST getting the coaxium. Get rid of the entire burgeoning Rebellion at the end, get rid of Darth Maul's pointless cameo (lesson learned from Marvel and Star Wars' own prequels: keep the movie and TV shows (relatively) separate). Just have it be a movie about thieves where betrayal and conflicting loyalties are the norm. Involve the Rebellion if you have to, but certainly don't end the film on the note that Han is secretly a Good Guy. That's the one nod to nostalgia I would allow. Han Solo in the OT is a rogue who learns to listen to his better angels. Having that already happen in the origin story diminishes the drama of that story arc.

Bah. Decent movie, could be better, could have been waaaay worse.

[captain america]

While not purely SOLO news, there are rumors that KK is getting the boot. No confirmation as yet.

 

[danth]

"Someone got ethnics in my Star Wars. It must be a woman's fault! Get her!"

[mechaninac]

It's not "got ethnics in..." -- what a sophomoric straw-man and non sequitur -- that may get her the boot; it's her gross negligence, incompetence, and mismanagement that might do her in.  It takes a lot of compounded stupid decisions and cultivation of bad blood to fail so spectacularly with a franchise that should've been an absolute no-brainer cash cow for Disney/Lucasfilm:  Give the core audience what they want and you get Marvel CU success, dictate to the core audience what they should want and belittle and vilify them if they don't, and you get the current state of Star Wars; it's that simple... I guess KK must've skipped class on the day they discussed the concept of "the customer is always right" in Business 101.

 

Edit:  The unfortunate part, vis à vis Solo, is that it is suffering from the backlash derived not from the dumpster fire that was TLJ, but from KK's et al's response to the criticism from fans... their massive F-U to the fans on all fronts guaranteed that Solo would be pretty much DOA; and from all reviews I've seen thus far, Solo isn't a bad movie... mediocre to passable, maybe, but a serviceable and even enjoyable, if flawed, addition to the franchise.

Edited June 8, 2018 by mechaninac

[tekering]

A voice from the moderate end of the spectrum:

http://theweek.com/articles/775857/dont-fire-kathleen-kennedy-over-solo

[renegadeleader1]

6 hours ago, danth said:

"Someone got ethnics in my Star Wars. It must be a woman's fault! Get her!"

 

[kajnrig]

....yeah, the level of vitriol is getting pretty silly again. Just gonna add to my review that my nephew's friend saw it and apparently didn't think it was that great. So... I dunno, maybe just more evidence that this is a fan movie through and through. From my limited perspective, the younger generation seem to love the new trilogy so far and have a less enthusiastic response to the side stories (which certainly makes sense, as so far the side stories have subsisted almost wholly on nostalgia), so perhaps the "core audience" @mechaninac is referring to isn't the "core audience" anymore.

[mikeszekely]

2 hours ago, tekering said:

A voice from the moderate end of the spectrum:

http://theweek.com/articles/775857/dont-fire-kathleen-kennedy-over-solo

I dunno, seems to me like she brought up the valid criticism that Kennedy seems to have a lack of vision or direction for the franchise, dismissed it by saying that the first three Disney Star Wars films were financially successful, then suggested that the reason fans want someone like Dave Filoni to at least be brought in as a creative consultant is sexism.

Now, I'm not naive enough to believe that none of the fans are blameless... you only need look at the harassment that drove Kelly Marie Tran off Instagram for a reminder of that.  But people like Kennedy have been using the behavior of a few bad actors to dismiss legitimate criticism.  Star Wars has (had?) enough of a hardcore fanbase that at least the first few Disney Star Wars films were guaranteed to make money; the fact that they're underperforming on just the fourth outing while Infinity War hit $1 billion in record time long after pundits said we'd get tired of comic book films is a strong argument for what a cohesive vision or lack thereof can do for a cinematic universe.  Kennedy doesn't seem to get that, and neither does the author.

[Chronocidal]

So, an interesting comparison to make here would be actually looking at the wide variety of quality that came out of the EU novels.  There were a few good one-shot stories, but the core of what many people considered "quality" stories came from a few authors who generally communicated well with each other, and worked together to make sure characters felt consistent across their separate entries.  Criticisms of the individual novels and character portrayals aside, Zahn, Stackpole, and Allston tended to keep tabs on each other's characters so they could dangle plot threads that spanned between their separate books, and that sort style is what makes certain other books feel so jarring in comparison (ie the entire Callista storyline, or the Jedi Academy books).

The funny thing that happened though was that some of the books got so bad that some of the authors did (not so) sneaky fix-it stories that retold events from other angles to make more sense.  It didn't fix all the flaws, but it tied things together a bit better, and made some of the questionable character and story decisions maybe a bit more tolerable.

The scary thing is that Disney is doing that preemptively now, and in alternative media formats.  Instead of focusing on telling a coherent story in the prime format (movies), they're releasing books that are nearly required reading to make the movies tie together, and explain all the missing pieces that they decided to leave out.

I think part of the reason the EU books worked in the first place was because the characters and events of the original trilogy left people wanting more over time.  The situation now though is that everything is being thrown out at the fans at once.  Instead of devoting time and effort into making a cohesive story with compelling characters that people will want to learn more about, it's just assumed that everyone will want to know everything about everyone, and people are bombarded from all angles with side stories and additional information before they even have a chance to ask for it, let alone develop a desire for all the extraneous information.  It's just oversaturation.

The whole process is stacking a pile of carts in front of a horse, and hoping the horse has the strength to push them all.  You have to give time for the fanbase to develop a desire for all that information you're throwing out at them.  Otherwise, it's like browsing for a specific item online, and being so overwhelmed by pop-up ads for things you don't care about, you give up, and decide you didn't need that thing anyway.

[electric indigo]

Hm, I dare say that things were running pretty smooth for Star Wars until TLJ: TFA was massively hyped and gathered a new generation of fans, the actors were fine, the movie was fairly entertaining until you take a closer look, and it made tons of money - a pretty good place to start from. R1 brought a grittier, more mature perspective on Star Wars, again great visuals & acting, and Gareth Edwards was able to capture the spirit of a Star Wars movie, which IMO always relied heavily on nostalgia. And then came TLJ with it's multi-dimensional f#-ups, and all of a sudden Star Wars is toxic.

Stay tuned for Episode IX: The last Hope

[Big s]

I had been avoiding information regarding this film until my daughter’s schedule allowed us to finally see the film. We had fun with the movie, but the major flaw was that at no point did I feel like this was Han Solo. The actor wasn’t bad but I just didn’t feel convinced that he was who he was supposed to be.

The rest of the film was good enough for a ticket purchase and maybe more enjoyable if you just pretend that it’s about a random dude that awkwardly ended up with the same name.

I honestly think the major controversy and reason for poor ticket sales is probably due to the fact that most people don’t need a back story to a perfect character and attempting to do so just sets you up for a fail or let down.

[sh9000]

 

[spanner]

Went and saw Solo last weekend with my son. Was ok but I only really wanted to see it because Emilia Clarke is in it and she's fine AF!!! 

The Droid L3 was quite hilarious too! 

[Kelsain]

I finally caught this with my daughter yesterday. Overall, I enjoyed it, I bought Alden as Solo, and had a fun time with the Easter eggs. At the same time, it was a little underwhelming to me. I’d give it a “fine.”